Sniper Elite 5 is still the slowest and most sensual burn among shooters

polygon.com:

Sniper Elite first visited me in a dream. Seriously. In the summer of 2014, my subconscious was rinsing out whatever I’d read on the internet that day, and I woke up with a compulsion I have never felt before. Where Richard Dreyfus sculpted a mountain out of mashed potatoes, I would buy Sniper Elite 3.

I think about that premonition every time I have played the game, from 2014 to 2017’s Sniper Elite 4, and in a two-and-a-half-hour preview of Sniper Elite 5 that Rebellion Entertainment organized two weeks ago. Such gut feeling, that You-will-go-to-the-Dagobah-system imperative, is absolutely necessary to enjoy a game that demands the player meet it on its terms, and play at its pace. It took all 150 minutes I had with Sniper Elite 5 to blunder through the second chapter mission and complete only its core objectives — not even the optional kill that usually represents a level’s greatest tension and action. But I loved every second.

In Sniper Elite 5, the one-man surgical strike known as Karl Fairburne is inside France in 1944, pressing the Allied liberation onward from Italy (Sniper Elite 4) and North Africa (Sniper Elite 3). The Allies have broken the Nazis’ Atlantikwall at Normandy and elsewhere, with Karl among the invasion force. But he’s trapped behind enemy lines and regrouping with French resistance fighters. Naturally, the Nazis have some spectacular doomsday idea cooking, and it’s called Operation Kraken. Fairburne, grimacing manfully, is here to shut it down.

Sniper Elite 5, launching at the end of May, follows its predecessor by almost five years, and the gameplay systems I saw spoke of an effort to refine visual information to its most necessary components. Details like Fairiburne’s heart rate (critical for